Dear Readers,
I have been working very hard on finding the perfect Android tablet to conduct small to mid size surveys - both of a social based research background and that of market research.
Having keep notes on this blog you would realize that so far the best Android platform is the 2.2/2.3 versions of Android.
I have made some comparably encountered with various devices used over the 4th quarter of 2012 doing live surveys.
Device display:
Best display for gocanvas application seem to be based on the 1024 x 600 resolutions - found on 10 inche
devices running the Android platform 2.2 or 2.3.
Android 3.0 and above is great - it is beautify and full of excitement - but that is actually a challenge when doing a survey. Most of these devices with Honeycomb ( Android 3.0) comes with a very high resolution - 1280x 800 pixels -
Overall the high resolutions makes all the controls - much smaller, textboxes becomes narrow, the nav. buttons are now small (needing a pen point finger to move to the next screen etc).
Photo 1 shows the android 3.0 high resolution of the canvas software.
Photo 2 show the same survey under android 2.2- notice the buttons and the spacing seem to be much better
Field workers are the ones who has reported this different experience they had with these devices.
When my company first introduced the idea of tablet with Android and Gocanvas software for data collection, field workers were delighted by the experience of entering their data.
We then upgraded to Android devices based on the Archos brand....
The complains began to roll in...
We are now reverting back to older tablets such as - Coby Kyros 10 inch. for standard data collection, since these older devices seems to all lack the back cam, and some dont even have a GPS.
Most of all they are not made to work out in the sunlight...
Recommendations:
Mr. Android tablet makers. We need the following
1. a 10 inch device with that runs android 2.2 or 2.3 with the same IPS technology that drives on the display. Resolution of the screen should be 1024 x 600
2. Have a back (rear) cam with at flash and minimum 5.0 MB
3. Ensure that there is some GPS in the device.
4. Push the battery life for a full 8 hours - and if you cant do this - ensure that there is a very easy way to change or replace the battery.
5. Give me some sort of scratch resistance on the surface, and make the outer body with a rubbery material to finish.
6. Give me regular USB 2.0 (not the mini USB)
7. I don't need HDMI !
8. Rocker for volume and power button.
9. Wifi, 3G will be fine (but Wifi is good enough if 3G will run the cost high)
10. design an easy interface that can - allow user to enable an application to take over when the system boots and requires a password to get to the "tab screens". This will force my user not to be playing with my device but to use it for the intention.
This is a start for a "Survey Tab" or Survey tablet.
Thanks
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